Choke Berry's New Sound - Chokeberry & Marshmallow Sour
Bonehead Brewing
- From:
- Bonehead Brewing
- Australia
- Style:
- Fruited Sour Ale
- ABV:
- 7%
- Score:
- +9 ratings needed
- Avg:
- 2.45 | pDev: 0%
- Ratings:
- | reviews: 1
- Status:
- Active
- Rated:
- Feb 13, 2023
- Added:
- Feb 12, 2023
- Wants:
- 0
- Gots:
- 0
NO SCORE
-
-
A creamy, mixed culture sour stacked full of berries, marshmallow fluff and a splash of vanilla. Big, bold and beautiful, expect this purple beauty to hit the high notes with a tart intro, ice-cream and bubble gum chorus and a palate cleansing acidic encore.
GABS2022
GABS2022
Recent ratings and reviews.
Reviewed by AzfromOz from Australia
2.45/5 rDev 0%
look: 2.5 | smell: 2.5 | taste: 2 | feel: 4 | overall: 2.5
2.45/5 rDev 0%
look: 2.5 | smell: 2.5 | taste: 2 | feel: 4 | overall: 2.5
Acquired as a Christmas present in 2022. Drunk in January 2023.
L: Deep ruby red with pink highlights. Utterly no head. A small amount of carbonation can be seen in the glass. It looks like a cocktail rather than a beer.
S: I have grappled with this descriptor for a while. Is it blackcurrant? Blackberry? I assume the dominant smell is chokeberry, but I wouldn't know a chokeberry if it up and jumped out of my cereal bowl. There's a creaminess there too that puts me in mind of a 1980s Tarax Creamy Soda, but I doubt that's a thing outside of 1980s Victoria so it might be a pointless descriptor. Regardless, there's nothing on the nose here that makes me want to actively drink this beer.
T: The taste has me thinking of pink grapefruit juice, that tart but weirdly bitter drink beloved of breakfast. The creamy marshmallow part of the duopoly comes through mildly at the end, but it never approaches the big, bold notes of the initial pink grapefruit hit. The beer ends quite tart and this totally blows away the creaminess, that then comes back retronasally. So the beer goes tart, creamy, tart, creamy. It's weird. Really weird.
M: The mouthfeel is very light but also sticky, meaning presumably that the pastry part of the pastry sour is asserting itself here. To be honest, this is the best part of the beer.
O: In the immortal words of Australian right-wing politician, Pauline Hanson, I don't like it. This is a novelty beer brewed for the novelty section of the Great Australian Beer Festival, Australia's biggest beer festival, held annually absent COVID. Each year breweries brew a novelty beer, meant to be experienced in 50ish ml pours. They're often weird, whacky and wonderful, but they're not known for translating well into normal format serves. There are of course a few exceptions, but for mine this one is not one of them. There's nothing beyond novelty here and no reason to ever go back to the beer.
One other thing: Australian brewers have been known in the past to borrow intellectual property from movies, tv and popular culture for can designs, but my understanding was that this was dwindling away as people were either asked to desist (*cough* Jedi Juice *cough*) or took it upon themselves to be less flagrant in their borrowings. This beer name and can art on this one is such a flagrant take on Back to the Future (and I love that movie, btw!) that it's double-take worthy. I'm going to assume Robert Zemeckis' approval wasn't sought here...
Overall, I'm not a fan of this one, even taking the style guidelines (at least that which informally exists for pastry sours) and the intent of the brewer into account.
Cheers!
#191
Feb 13, 2023L: Deep ruby red with pink highlights. Utterly no head. A small amount of carbonation can be seen in the glass. It looks like a cocktail rather than a beer.
S: I have grappled with this descriptor for a while. Is it blackcurrant? Blackberry? I assume the dominant smell is chokeberry, but I wouldn't know a chokeberry if it up and jumped out of my cereal bowl. There's a creaminess there too that puts me in mind of a 1980s Tarax Creamy Soda, but I doubt that's a thing outside of 1980s Victoria so it might be a pointless descriptor. Regardless, there's nothing on the nose here that makes me want to actively drink this beer.
T: The taste has me thinking of pink grapefruit juice, that tart but weirdly bitter drink beloved of breakfast. The creamy marshmallow part of the duopoly comes through mildly at the end, but it never approaches the big, bold notes of the initial pink grapefruit hit. The beer ends quite tart and this totally blows away the creaminess, that then comes back retronasally. So the beer goes tart, creamy, tart, creamy. It's weird. Really weird.
M: The mouthfeel is very light but also sticky, meaning presumably that the pastry part of the pastry sour is asserting itself here. To be honest, this is the best part of the beer.
O: In the immortal words of Australian right-wing politician, Pauline Hanson, I don't like it. This is a novelty beer brewed for the novelty section of the Great Australian Beer Festival, Australia's biggest beer festival, held annually absent COVID. Each year breweries brew a novelty beer, meant to be experienced in 50ish ml pours. They're often weird, whacky and wonderful, but they're not known for translating well into normal format serves. There are of course a few exceptions, but for mine this one is not one of them. There's nothing beyond novelty here and no reason to ever go back to the beer.
One other thing: Australian brewers have been known in the past to borrow intellectual property from movies, tv and popular culture for can designs, but my understanding was that this was dwindling away as people were either asked to desist (*cough* Jedi Juice *cough*) or took it upon themselves to be less flagrant in their borrowings. This beer name and can art on this one is such a flagrant take on Back to the Future (and I love that movie, btw!) that it's double-take worthy. I'm going to assume Robert Zemeckis' approval wasn't sought here...
Overall, I'm not a fan of this one, even taking the style guidelines (at least that which informally exists for pastry sours) and the intent of the brewer into account.
Cheers!
#191
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